A pretty little plaque from the front of the typewriter. You can check out the patents here, here, and here. The first two are clearly for this typewriter and were filed by George B. Sholes on behalf of his deceased father, the famous Christopher Latham Sholes. The third, oddly, is for a guard to protect people from pinching their fingers in doors. -- UPDATE: A resourceful reader has discovered that there's an error on the plaque. The correct third patent number is 474,533, filed by Christopher's son Frederick Sholes, in Frederick's own name.

I wanted to understand how the machine is put together and get access to some interesting parts of the mechanism -- in order to clean them, and in order to gawk at them. First I tried something easy, removing the ribbon cups.

More is coming off:

Naturally, it's very important to keep track of all parts, including screws. (The best thing is to screw them back where they belong immediately, when possible.)

Here's another part coming off, a thick cast-iron shelf. Under it there is the usual assortment of insect corpses.

Over a century ago, a worker scratched the serial number into the bottom of the cast iron shelf:

Now I know how Howard Carter felt when he discovered the tomb of King Tut. This is the magic mechanism! Completely different from any other typewriter, the Sholes Visible operates roughly as follows. Each horizontal rod forms a single piece with a projecting small rod and a typebar. When you depress a key, the rod slides toward the center, then pivots to swing the typebar to the platen. This motion is controlled by the guide plate which I've now removed.

This is the back of the guide plate. Made of copper (or brass?), it is a work of art in itself, reminiscent of some Frank Lloyd Wright creation.

When you wet and wipe the front of the guide plate, you can see not only that it's pinstriped, but also that the diagonal areas have been treated with bluing.

I put everything back together before calling it a day. Slowly, tentatively, the dignity and beauty of this typewriter are emerging.

No other typewriter ever used this mechanism, to my knowledge. The Sholes seems to have been marketed unsuccessfully by more than one entity, however. Most are marked "A. D. Meiselbach Typewriter Co., Kenosha, Wis., USA," and have a nice Meiselbach emblem to the left of the "Sholes" on the paper table. (Meiselbach also built trucks.) But my machine doesn't have a trace of Meiselbach. The typewriter was also marketed by E. H. Stafford Mfg. Co. of Chicago, but their ad pictures a machine with Meiselbach decals.

Fascinating, as I expected from the first picture. Those hexagonal shaped keytops look like the ones on my Oliver. Was that a stylistic choice or perhaps a certain subcontractor just did them that way?

What a beautiful machine. It must be very gratifying to work on it- discovery, rejuvenating, refurbishing. Isn't it strange the more we move into the future, the deeper we dig into the past.luckyramu@yahoo.com

I'm wondering if the short levers that extend through the front plate off the horizontal rod were purposely exposed? Was it common that the operator needed to unjam the typebars by moving these levers back to their home position? I can't imagine another reason that they would be out in the open.